These Valley students are the first in their families to college. Here’s what that’s like

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Amber Partida, 23, is seen before graduation ceremonies for CSUN’s Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communications at California State University Northridge on Friday, May 18, 2018. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

When he walks across the stage at Los Angeles Valley College on June 5, Ronnell Evans will mark the end of one journey and the start of another. After five years of study and work to support himself, he’ll have earned his associate’s degree.

Evans, a 26-year-old from Pacoima, is the first in his family to graduate from college. Neither his father, incarcerated since Evans was three, nor his mother, a nursing assistant, went to college. With a sometimes unsteady home life and financial struggles, Evans has had to meet his goal of college largely on his own.

“I was completely uninformed about college,” he said. “The goal was for us to graduate high school so we could get jobs and support ourselves.”

Across the San Fernando Valley and Los Angeles this spring, thousands of graduates like Evans will be the first in their families to earn a college degree. According to LAVC, 32 percent of students in the fall of 2016, the most recent data available, were from families where neither parent went to college.

Ronnell Evans, 26, left, is the first person in his family to graduate from college, earning an associate’s degree from Los Angeles Valley College. Rachel Ochoa, 17, right, is about to graduate from the Social Justice Humanitas Academy at the Cesar E. Chavez Learning Academies. She is slated to attend Stanford University. (Courtesy photos)

For those students, that may mean an extra set of challenges versus their classmates with college-educated parents, such as navigating financial aid and learning more intensive study habits.

First-generation students may also have more demands on their time, said Alma Olivares-Luera, an academic counselor at LAVC in the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services office, which connects low-income students, many of them first-generation, with services like tuition waivers.

Olivares-Luera said that of the first-generation students she sees at LAVC, many are expected to keep helping out at home, on top of their studies. That may mean looking after siblings or working to bring in extra income to the family or to pay their tuition, she said. With those demands, it may take first-generation students longer to finish their degrees.

“Even though a family may value a college education, they may not be aware of the time it takes to be a college student,” Olivares-Luera said.

A lot on their shoulders

Even after getting to college, first-generation students have some odds stacked against them. According to studies cited by the U.S. Department of Education, first-generation students take out student loans more often and in higher amounts in their first year of college, compared to students who are children of at least one former college student. A decade after they were in high school, first-generation students were less likely to have finished bachelor’s or master’s degrees compared to children of former college students, another study found.

“Everything in my life has been pretty rocky for the most part. Education was something I had control over, and no one could take it from me.”

— Amber Partida, 23

As a student at California State Northridge, Amber Partida didn’t have the benefit of parents with college experience. While she worked toward her journalism degree, her life was turned upside-down. Her parents divorced and her family was evicted from their apartment, just as Partida started school. Two years later, in 2015, her father died of brain cancer. Then, as Partida was entering her final semester at LAVC, her mother died of cancer.

“Everything in my life has been pretty rocky for the most part,” said the 23-year-old from South Pasadena. “Education was something I had control over, and no one could take it from me.”

Partida was preceded in college by an older sister, now a preschool teacher. Though her parents never attended college, they knew education was important.

“They wanted me to go to college, but they didn’t know the route to get there,” she said. “They didn’t know what financial aid was.”

With her new degree, Partida said she’ll be looking for her first journalism job or move on to a master’s degree. Sports journalism is her passion, but international reporting interests her, too. Already, she has an impressive internship under her belt, at PBS Newshour in Washington, D.C. It was during that internship that Partida’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. Even so, Partida said, “she encouraged me to stay and finish my fellowship. She knew how much it meant to me.”

About one-third of students at the California State University collection of schools come from families where neither parent went to college, according to CSU (though these students may have had an older sibling attend college). Locally, at CSUN, just under 15,000 of the approximately 40,000 students enrolled last fall were in the first generation of their families to go to college, according to CSU statistics. That’s 38 percent, up from about 35 percent in the 2014 fall class at CSUN.

Gearing up for the journey

For another first-generation student, the challenges of college still lie ahead.

Rachel Ochoa, a 17-year-old from Sylmar, is graduating from Social Justice Humanitas Academy, part of the Cesar E. Chavez Learning Academies, on May 31. Her parents immigrated from Mexico when they were just teenagers. Her dad worked in construction.

“My dad’s a blue-collar worker, so he always told me that if I went to college, I didn’t have to physically exhaust myself (in a job),” Ochoa said.

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This fall, Ochoa will not only be the first in her family to go to college, she’ll be a freshman at Stanford University.

Without the benefit of parents with college experience, Ochoa has taken advantage of opportunities in high school to prepare, such as AP courses and a college readiness program that taught her and her parents about financial aid.

At a summer institute last year at Princeton University, part of a selective college-preparation program for top students from low-income families called Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, Ochoa stumbled on the global issue of femicide, the killing of women and girls because of their sex. Now she plans to study international relations and wants to become an international lawyer.

“It’s just realizing that I’m not where I am instead of my obstacles, but because of them. I have to remember where I’m from.”

— Rachel Ochoa, 17

She’ll be getting a big push. As one of 300 recipients of the Gates Scholarship from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation each year, Ochoa will have her full undergraduate tuition and expenses covered.

One of the biggest hurdles on the path to college, Ochoa said, has been to rely on other adults.

“I haven’t really talked about my background except for this year, (being) low-income,” she said. “I didn’t even know what FAFSA was, and my parents didn’t know how to fill it out. I had to open up, and that was really hard for me.”

There are challenges ahead, too. Ochoa expects she’ll feel some culture shock, coming from a high school that is overwhelmingly Hispanic and going into a university where only 11 percent of students are Hispanic, according to 2016 figures.

“It’s just realizing that I’m not where I am instead of my obstacles, but because of them,” she said. “I have to remember where I’m from.”

Inspiration

For Evans, the LAVC student, the first impulse to go to college came when he was a high school student at Cleveland Humanities Magnet in Reseda.

“Being in a magnet program, you’re around a lot of different kids, and a lot of them from affluent backgrounds, families that pushed their kids to college,” he said. “Just from being exposed to those people, (I thought) ‘they live a little more comfortable than my family does, so maybe I should have my academic trajectory be a little more like theirs.’”

When Evans revealed to his mother in his junior year of high school that he is gay, it disrupted his relationship with her. After that, he lived at home off and on, staying with other relatives. Though he had support as a young gay man in high school, he said, what he didn’t have was a lot of guidance about higher education.

“Nobody really ever sat down with me and was like, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’” he said. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I knew that I was creative. I knew that I was different, but I didn’t know how to translate that into a career.”

After high school, while working as a makeup artist at Nordstrom and MAC, Evans started taking community college classes, one at a time. In 2016, he got a boost from a week-long summer program under UCLA’s Center for Community College Partnerships. He and other students stayed in the UCLA dorms, ate their meals on campus and attended lectures and workshops. To see so many successful black professors inspired him, he said.

Evans will earn his general studies associate’s degree this spring. He hopes to be accepted to UCLA, where he’s waitlisted, or attend UC Riverside, where he’s been accepted. Eventually, he’d like to go into public relations, particularly to represent black people in the arts and entertainment in a positive way, something he sees as lacking in the media.

The community he’s formed at college helped him stick with school, he said. He’s a tutor at LAVC’s writing center, an award-winning member of the speech and debate team and a member of LAVC’s Black Scholars program, which gives academic support to black students.

“I always knew that I was capable (of going to college),” he said. “Coming to Valley College for me was such a great opportunity because it showed me that you don’t have to be rich to get an education.”

Antonie Boessenkool is a freelancer who previously covered education and the Los Angeles Unified School District for the Los Angeles Daily News. She previously worked in Washington, D.C., covering finance and the defense industry, and in Bakersfield, covering city government. In Orange County, she wrote about arts, features and home decor.